False alarm in Malwarebytes can be fixed with an update

Q. I am running Malwarebytes to keep my system free of spyware. Lately I keep getting a message that says “Successfully blocked access to a potentially malicious website 192.168.1.255 Type outgoing Port 137” What should I do?

A. The address in question is a local IP on your network. All IP addresses starting with 192.168 are not Internet addresses and are used by your home network to give all of your devices access to your Internet connection.

With this in mind, my first thought was that this is not something to be overly concerned with in terms of security. Malwarebytes appears to be doing its job by blocking the suspicious access. Had the IP address in question been an Internet based address, I would be a bit more concerned.

Taking this info I went to the Malwarebytes discussion forums and did a quick search on the message. I was able to determine that this particular alert is what is known as a “false positive” which is something that can happen with security software. Antivirus and antimalware software looks at all the activity on your PC and makes determinations as to whether it is malicious or not and sometimes it gets it wrong, usually by being overly cautious.

Malwarebytes has corrected this issue in the latest update to their malware database. You can update your software by using the update feature within the program or by downloading and running the database updater from here.